March 31, 2012

Animation: Alternate Mad Men titles

Design HTML5 visually with Adobe Muse beta 7

Generating lots of excitement, and getting better with each rev:

With this Beta 7 release, you can expect incredible improvements to performance and a significantly more streamlined workflow for previewing and publishing your sites, plus a host of bug fixes and enhancements. Muse will also be part of the upcoming Creative Cloud Membership! For a complete list of updates, visit the Muse Beta 7 blog post.

March 30, 2012

Creating HTML Canvas content with Flash Pro

Let’s get a lot more people making animated HTML5 content. To do that, we need to lower the barriers to entry. Letting the hundreds of thousands of people with Flash skills leverage those skills is a good solid step. Flash PM Tom Barclay shows how the Toolkit for CreateJS can help smooth the transition from ActionScript development to the JavaScript world.

And here Christian Cantrell goes into a bit more depth around things like sprite sheets:

Demo: Lighting Effects in CS6

For years, at the start of every Photoshop cycle, some version of the following conversation repeated itself:

“People really love Lighting Effects, but we haven’t touched it in *years*.”
“Yeah, there’s so much cool stuff we could do there! This should really be a major investment.”
“Ah, but we can’t this time… Could we at least just make the dang preview window bigger?”
“Well, that code was written on punch cards during the Nixon Administration, and the effect should really just work on canvas (no preview window at all), so really we should rewrite everything, but…”

…and so on.

At last, though, the team has had time to deliver something that’s worth the wait. Check out the goodness in action:

“You would think that after a program has been the leader in its field for over 20 years, there wouldn’t be much to add. But quite the opposite is the case with Adobe Photoshop CS6.

“The new version will thrill nearly all categories of users, from photographers to designers.

“All of this adds up to a superb upgrade that should make anyone serious about image editing salivate over Photoshop CS6.”

Wired: “Content-aware brushes, Liquify filter and new Blur tool will amaze. In-app search is a huge time-saver for sifting through giant stacks of layers.”

USA Today: “We’ve been testing CS6 for the last week, and having lots of fun with the new tools. The new interface is a huge improvement — the images really do look sharper and more pronounced.”

And from some designers I follow on Twitter:

“I’ll use it for a few days so I can give a better assessment, but so far: ball out of the park.” — Neven Mrgan

“I’ve been using PS CS6 for a while, and it’s been sweet… The truth is that CS6 has a bunch of changes that make my life a lot better but may piss off some users. Which is great. Adobe did well.” — Sebastiaan de With

“I think the community at large agrees: PS6 is an incredible update.” — Cameron Moll

On Friday Photoshop PM Zorana Gee will show new features in the Photoshop CS6 beta. She’ll give you an overview of the release as well as some tips and tricks on how to get started. The session is at 12pm Eastern. Register here.

Video: The Adobe Digital Imaging Team at Photoshop World 2012

A new color-picking panel for Photoshop

Did you know that computer-based color schemes do not correspond to fine art ones? Where you expect green to be a complement color to red, the computer gives you cyan. Why is that? Because computers usually use a HSV color model, while classic painters use a completely different color wheel. And it’s available now exclusively to Photoshop in the MagicPicker color wheel panel! Painters, photographers, designers and everyone else can know use their knowledge of classic arts. They can build their unique color schemes based on intuitive, real-world paint behavior.

MagicPicker 2.1 also brings a Photoshop CS6 beta support and a significant speed increase.

Hitting Return/Enter will put keyboard focus back onto PS proper (consistent with how other text fields work in the app). Esc does the same but also cancels whatever change you just made.

Note that clearing the field isn’t the same as toggling filtering on/off with the little red switch to the right. Why? Because toggling the switch is non-destructive: You can set up filtering criteria (e.g. show me all text & adjustment layers), then quickly enable/disable filtering; you don’t have to keep setting up the parameters.

A big deal, used by tons & tons of people? Maybe not. But to me it speaks volumes about quality and craftsmanship, and God help me, I live for this stuff.

March 25, 2012

Demo: How to use type styles in CS6

The #1 feature requested by Web designers has been type styles–the ability to modify one style definition & update multiple text layers at once. Now the feature is ready to use in the Photoshop CS6 beta. Deke McClelland shows you how:

Check out new Content-Aware tech in CS6

PS Touch, Ideas bundled with new Galaxy Note

PS Touch is the Note 10.1’s undisputed S-Pen gem. Creative pros will find comfort in this tablet adaptation of Adobe’s über-popular Photoshop program, as most of the features, though laid out differently, remain intact. While it’s not a complete replacement for a desktop graphics workstation, the app does give pros some flexibility, letting them create on-the-go much the same way they’d do in the office or at home.

Layer search/filtering (e.g. show me just the type layers in this doc)

Multiple strokes per layer (you can apply a new vector stroke + a traditional layer effect stroke, and by applying layer effects at the group level, you can effectively put multiple sets of layer effects on each layer)

…and that’s a truncated list. Check out Marc’s article for more.

We had so many of these improvements in mind for many years, but other work like the Cocoa & 64-bit transitions kept getting in the way. (Type styles & layer searching almost made the cut for CS5.) It’s not since Photoshop 6.0, which introduced shape layers & which was released back in 2000, that the team has made this much progress for Web/UI folks in one rev. We hope you like it.

March 21, 2012

Come download Photoshop CS6!

Blazingly fast performance and a modern UI — Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop. Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop.

Content-Aware Patch — Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result.

There’s much more info to come, and I look forward to zeroing in on the Web & app design features especially. In the meantime, go grab yourself a copy, and check out the user forum to ask the team questions & share your feedback.

Metadata can kill you

A real-world example from 2007: When a new fleet of helicopters arrived with an aviation unit at a base in Iraq, some soldiers took pictures on the flightline, he said. From the photos that were uploaded to the Internet, the enemy was able to determine the exact location of the helicopters inside the compound and conduct a mortar attack, destroying four of the AH-64 Apaches.

March 20, 2012

Video: Base jumping in Singapore

“What could make the view from the infinity pool atop the Marina Bay Sands casino, soaring some 55 stories above Singapore, even more surreal?,” asks Core77. “Human bodies jumping off of the roof behind you.”

March 19, 2012

CSS Regions: One Year In

To make tablet publications lighter weight & more dynamic (offering liquid layout, etc.), publishers need HTML to get smarter. Otherwise, to get the layout richness their brands require, they’re stuck with things like creating huge piles of PNGs.

That’s why Adobe’s been helping advance proposals for CSS Regions & Exclusions. To hear about the progress they’re making, check out CSS Regions: One Year In. (For background, see the demo below from a couple of months back.)

Come help us make WebKit more kickass

“The better the web, the better tools we can build, and the happier our customers.” With that in mind, Adobe’s putting more & more muscle into advancing HTML standards & helping rendering engines support them.

Adobe’s WebKit Contributions group is improving the web as a platform for applications by implementing features that enable new classes of applications, new levels of application richness, and by improving the tools web developers use to create, debug, profile, test and maintain applications. Features are developed in the open and contributed to WebKit trunk. This group works closely with web application developers and the web standards community to identify opportunities for improvement.

March 18, 2012

A new Lightroom 4 video workshop

Former Adobe evangelist George Jardine is now offering the Adobe Lightroom 4 Video Workshop, 16 new tutorials that focus on the Library workflow & digital asset management:

This all-new set of 16 video tutorials gives you over 6 hours of the very best online education available. It covers the Adobe Lightroom 4 Library and your digital photo library management from top to bottom. We start from the ground up, and guide any serious photographer—professional or passionate amateur—through the process of building an easy-to-use, but incredibly effective digital photo library. The complete series is only $24.95.

A sample video (“Collections & Virtual Copies”) is available to check out.

Jumping rope, from the rope’s point of view

March 17, 2012

[OT] Bay Area Lego shindig tomorrow

On Monday at Pixar (where the lobby is adorned with giant Lego Woody & Buzz), I overheard not one but two groups of fellow nerds excitedly discussing Bricks By The Bay, happening this weekend in Santa Clara. Our boys have been counting the days ever since. Hope to see you there!

A kid’s Rube Goldberg monster trap

A sneak of Photoshop.next’s new 3D chops

Motion graphics: A Hunter S. Thompson homage… for a bookstore?

“It is not very often that we have the opportunity to create a graphic equivalent of a drug-fueled rant bringing all of our collective skills to bear,” writes the team at Buck. “And it is almost unfathomable that we could actually do something like this and benefit a good cause.”

The project promotes Good Books, an online bookseller that passes all its profits through to Oxfam. [Via Russell Williams]

Do not taunt Angry Time Machine

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. — Not Jack Handey

If you’ve had trouble backing up your Mac via Time Machine–as I did once I installed Lion–do not, for the love of God, push your luck and try to use Time Machine to migrate data from one Mac to another. Just don’t.

Details if you want ‘em:

Post-10.7, I couldn’t update my backups on my Drobo and Time Capsule, nor could I get one to work on the new USB 3.0 drive I bought for the job. When I tried a fresh FireWire drive, however, everything seemed cool. Thus when my new Mac arrived, I tried transferring apps & data via the Migration Assistant.

And now begins the screamin’ & the wailin': The apps that made it over were all zero KB, and files never transferred. Not a big deal, I thought: I can just re-install apps & move files manually. The trouble is, when I tried to install Apple Motion, I got a series of errors about missing files (ProKit). I tried various work arounds, including installing the FCP X trial. Soon, though, all the Apple apps, as well as iPhoto, were crashing on launch. It seems that the failed app migration stomped a bunch of critical libraries.

Here’s the excellent part, though: Lion’s airbag works great. At the advice of my exhausted Apple friend (who’d been supplying would-be fixes), I finally reinstalled the OS. Fearing the worst (bare-metal, nuke-from-orbit, dogs-and-cats-living-together stuff), I backed up my files and blocked off a bunch of time. I still cannot believe how well it went: restarted the machine, held down Cmd-R, okayed a couple of prompts, and half an hour later 10.7.3 was up and running as if nothing had happened. Everything (open docs, browser history, passwords, etc.) was restored. I’m still kind of holding my breath, but so far, so amazingly good. Hats off to the Apple folks behind this capability.

Brad Bird on morale

In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

March 13, 2012

Interview: Adobe inside the CSS Working Group

Eng manager Arno Gourdol nails it:

We are in a unique position: we have deep expertise in relevant areas (typography, animation, layout, digital imaging, video and so on) and we have a deep understanding of the needs of creative customers who want to use the web to express themselves. We can represent their point of view and advocate on their behalf. The better the web, the better tools we can build, and the happier our customers.

Who do I fear being at work?

[I find myself making this joke when I actually do connect people who wouldn’t otherwise talk (different teams, engineers with customers, etc.). Still, it’s an odd job where one doesn’t often *build* anything specific.]

Adobe Edge (HTML5 animation) Preview 5 is available

Publish to web: Preview 5 has an option to specify if jQuery should be packaged with the composition, or downloaded from a CDN to produce lighter code and improve caching.

Down-level browser support: Define a fallback state of a composition for non-HTML5 browsers like IE8 and below.

Preloader improvements: Choose what gets shown during the preloader (before the framework, jQuery, or composition is loaded).

Emphasis on animation:

Timeline: We made several significant improvements to the timeline that make composing animations much easier and faster, such as an easier to use Pin (formerly the Mark) and smarter playback behavior.

On-stage tools: New clip and transform tools make it easier to manipulate objects and create animation effects.

Many other enhancements:

Improved symbol functionality, stage editing options, the ability to swap images, more intuitive contextual menus, many bug fixes, and much more have been added to preview 5.

March 11, 2012

Japan’s tsunami zone, now & then

The Big Picture features a striking set of images comparing the tsunami/earthquake/nuclear zone exactly one year after the disaster. Click on each image to see the scene today compared with the moments of chaos. [Via John Dowdell]

March 10, 2012

“What happened to Fill Light and Recovery?”

The Lightroom team has evolved the editing control set in the just-released LR4, replacing a couple of popular but sometimes problematic controls:

Recovery can result in muddy highlights, and Fill Light can lead to visible halos at high-contrast boundaries. Furthermore, it is difficult to transfer the technology behind these controls to local adjustments.

With Process Version 2012 in Lightroom 4, we have introduced a new set of Basic tone controls that overcomes these limitations and results in much higher image quality. For example, the Highlights and Shadows tools are optimized for very high contrast images, produce much smoother highlight and shadow gradations, are available as local adjustments, and minimize halo artifacts.

Mercedes makes a real-world Content-Aware Fill

March 09, 2012

The story of Keep Calm and Carry On

“Did you know,” asks Kottke, “that this British WWII poster was never distributed to the public and was discovered only recently in an English book shop?” It’s adorned my Mac for years, but I had no idea. Three interesting minutes:

March 08, 2012

Hasselblad cameras will ship with Lightroom 4

Hasselblad’s Chris Russell-Fish said: “Integrating the Adobe platform with Hasselblad is a ground-breaking step… [N]ow all users can have the excellence of a Hasselblad image file married to the functionality and ease of use of Adobe Lightroom.”

Hasselblad customers who buy new medium format H4D cameras will receive Lightroom 4 software with their new camera equipment at no additional cost.”

Digital Publishing Suite to support the new iPad

When the new iPad ships, Digital Publishing Suite customers will have support for these new features in the enterprise-signed Adobe Content Viewer. This means you’ll be able to display stunning, full-bleed, immersive publications using every pixel of the 2048 x 1536 display with richer color saturation using Adobe Content Viewer technology. When the newest build of Content Viewer is approved in the Apple App Store, these features will be supported in all published new iPad applications.

March 06, 2012

Aching for better iOS app integration

Poor integration leads to bloated apps: if jumping among apps/modules is slow, customers gravitate towards all-in-one tools that offer more overall efficiency, even if the individual pieces are lacking.

[I]t’s just so much more convenient to stay in the canonical photo store; importing and exporting photos to and from another app is clumsier.

I experienced the pain, over and over, on my trip to Guatemala. Having taken just my iPad & Camera Connection Kit, I was eager to put a variety of photo tools to the test. Moving among apps was far & away the crappiest part of the experience. For example:

I’d review images in Photos, where I can see them nice and large. But I can’t say “Open in App X,” so…

I’d leave Photos, launch Snapseed, bring up the tiny, default image browser component, navigate to the same point in my photo library, and then try to pick the same image I’d just been looking at in Photos.

After editing, I’d hit Save, and images would go into the Camera Roll (not Imports, where I’d been browsing them). Thus I couldn’t see the edited images alongside the originals.

After repeating the process many times, I’d go to Flickr Studio, then carefully & laboriously add photos from various albums. (The app doesn’t let you re-order images, so I had to dive into the albums again & again just to get the sequence right.)

At last I’d upload.

This really, really sucked. Far more desirable:

Browse the images in the browser of my choice (Photos or something else–one that could, say, flag/sort/whittle down images, local or remote).

Tap one or more images and say “Send to App X” (to build a panorama, composite in PS Touch, apply a tilt shift blur, whatever)–no manual navigating to the other apps, no navigating back to the photos.

Be able to save, return to my browser, and see the edited image alongside the original.

Hand off one or more images to the sharing tool of my choice.

Let’s not bloat PS Touch with every damn filter we can think of; rather, let’s have a great way to pass data back and forth, so that apps can function as plug-ins to one another. (PhotoAppLink is a nice start, but we need something universal.) And let’s not all bloat our apps reinventing the image browser, integrating the same sharing services over & over, etc. There’s a far more elegant way to proceed.

Tangential: Neven also writes,

The iPad is too big to shoot with; the iPhone is too small to edit on. Bridging the two is fine in theory, but in practice there’s the hairy matter of extremely large file sizes.

But why is it that my phone or tablet can send HD video streams instantly to my TV, yet they can’t send photos or video to each other (or to my Mac)? To put a phone video onto my Mac, I have to upload the whole thing to something like Dropbox, then download it again; isn’t that kind of bizarre? I really thought that AirDrop would sort things out; hope springs eternal.

Camera Raw 6.7 available on Adobe Labs

Camera Raw 6.7 (required for full compatibility between Lightroom 4.0 and Photoshop CS5) & the free DNG Converter (which can make your raw files readable by any DNG-capable app, including older versions of Photoshop & Lightroom) are available as release candidates from Adobe Labs. New cameras supported:

Lightroom 4 arrives (at a great new price, too)

I’m delighted to say that Lightroom 4 is now available! Tom Hogarty writes,

With over 300,000 downloads of the Lightroom 4 public beta we’ve heard some resounding feedback that photographers would like to start using Lightroom 4 on a daily basis and migrate their previous Lightroom work to this latest version.

We’re also excited to announce new pricing for Lightroom 4: $149 for those new to Lightroom and $79 for the Upgrade and Student/Teacher editions. (You can upgrade from any version of Lightroom to Lightroom 4)

Increased range of local white balance controls (temperature and tint)

Updated Develop presets plus added new presets for video

Maximum Blurb book size is now 240 pages

Over 800 bugs found and fixed! (Thank you Lightroom 4 beta customers!)

Check out the rest of Tom’s post for additional details about camera & profiles now supported, etc. And happy shooting!

[PS–Customer feedback I just happened to see on Prodig list: “The new way of organizing the Raw adjustment sliders is to die for… You can fix your histogram with precision like a lepidopterist pinning a butterfly to a board.” — Robert Workman. Nice!]

March 02, 2012

Collaborative drawing: Is there a “there” there?

Do people actually do collaborative, realtime document editing–and if so, under what circumstances? Painter tried it in the 90’s with NetPainter (which only I & John Derry, who worked at Fractal back then, seem to remember), and I’ve seen tons of tools come & go over the years. Drawing is, for most people, difficult; we feel weird being watched; and we don’t like to watch others draw badly (or maybe even draw well in realtime).

And yet, and yet… I remain kind of fascinated by Layer Tennis, Mixel, and other collaboration efforts. Are there specific, real-world cases where you’d use tools like these–e.g. when brainstorming/moodboarding with teammates? And if so, do you use such tools (and if not, why not?).

Reflection app displays your iPad/iPhone on your Mac

I’ve lugged too many clumsy, heavy cameras around, then set up crappy video mirroring in order to give ill-lit, high-latency app demos. I’ve been excited at the prospect of using Thunderbolt to connect iPad HDMI into my Mac, but that would require hundreds of dollars worth of external hardware & cables. I think that all just went out the window: for $15 Reflection will mirror your iPad 2 or iPhone 4S onto your Mac desktop. I just installed the trial version and it works beautifully. Done & done. [Via]

Import photos from Android into Adobe Revel

Check it:

Take photos with an Android phone? To easily add them to your Adobe Revel photo library, put the Adobe Revel Importer app on your Android phone (OS2.2 or later) and then choose photos to import or set the app to auto-import all your shots. The app is free with your Adobe Revel subscription—get it today in the Android Marketplace.

March 01, 2012

Q&A tomorrow: Creative Cloud membership

Join Evangelist Paul Trani and Product Manager Yashodhan Gokhale for this hour-long session and learn how the Adobe Creative Cloud is going to reinvent the creative process. You’ll see how members can access all Adobe Creative Suite CS6 desktop tools, Adobe Touch Apps, and Adobe services allowing them to take creative ideas from concept to publishing–at breakthrough pricing starting at US$49.99 per month.